Posted this in a forum, just wanted to post it here:Let me start by saying that this will be my only post in this thread as I will say all that I feel that I need to say here, very shortly.

1: Catholics ARE Christians….regardless of what anyone may tell you, if someone says otherwise, then they clearly do not know anything about the Catholic Church and need to be re-educated. This isn’t slander, it is the truth.

2: Catholics put the Bible together, yes, the very book that you’re all quoting to say that Catholics are wrong, well, we put it together.. even Martin Luther attested to that

3: History reveals early Christians doing an early version of the Mass: Letters from around 100 AD that clearly describe what can only be compared to the Catholic Mass have been found. Don’t ask for them, I don’t know where they are, just that they exist. You might be able to find out about them at PhatMass.com

4: Christ wants UNITY and to continue this argument without honestly looking at things from both sides and remaining ignorant and continue to argue based on rumors, hearsay and misconstrued slander against the Catholic Church would just be ridiculous. So please, get yourselves educated on Why Catholics Do That

5. Read anything by Scott Hahn, G.K. Chesterton,Peter Kreeft or even, yes, J.R.R. Tolkien. All of them are smarter than I am, Chesterton and Tolkien are probably smarter than most of us combined. Chesterton and Tolkien were GREAT influences on C.S. Lewis. Yes, he read them, and was great friends with Tolkien. Perhaps we can all take something from their examples.

6. Arguing in a Forum goes Nowhere: because there is enough stuff already out there on both sides. If you truly wish to argue against something like Protestantism, or Catholicism, or Mormonism… go to the source and learn about them first. Do not make assumptions and accusations about things that you know little to nothing about. No matter how much you think you know, I guarentee you it is not enough.

At MatrixFans.net, someone posted a Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings thread. While I did enjoy the third film, I don’t believe Potter holds even a burnt out candle to Lord of the Rings. Here’s what I said:

J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of language, who didn’t take a real place and make a false place or a parallel dimension or any such thing.

Tolkien, in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings created a WHOLE WORLD, with histories, and races, and wars, and all sorts of incredible characters and they even had their own languages. Languages that fit logically with the characters. The Black Speech of Mordor is very harsh, while the Elvish tongues of Sindarin, etc. are very beautiful. Tolkien’s novels were released 50 years ago this year for the first time. While the Silmarillion was started in the trenches of World War I, I believe in 1917, it wasn’t finished or published until 1976, after Tolkien passed on. The Hobbit was out in the mid-30s. It took Tolkien 15 YEARS to craft THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Tolkien carefully crafted the entire book to the full. It is something that people of nearly any age, with a brain, can get into and enjoy. If you can’t, I feel sorry for you.

J.K. Rowling, like it or not, needs to tighten up her writing. Remove all of her “said Harry angrily’s,” and “said Harry really angrily’s,” and replace them with simply “said Harry.” Not only will that save ink, but also paper. The Order of the Pheonix has about 20,000 of those words. That is the length of a short story. No wonder the book appears to be so long. It’s not really. It’s just got a lot of extra wording padding it, making it appear longer than it is. The problem isn’t that she USES those explanations for how a character is talking. It’s that she uses them ALL THE TIME.

Also, given that Potter hasn’t yet ended, to compare the entire SEVEN BOOK Harry Potter to the ONE BOOK Lord of the Rings (as intended, although LOTR is actually SIX Books, with an appendix of what happens next as well), is foolish. You do not know what will happen at the end of Book Seven, and the whole series is dependent on that, like it or not. The end of The Lord of the Rings is perfect. You are happy, but sad as well, because you realize the price of freedom and at what price everything they fought for had. You see all the other people that were untouched by the war, that you don’t know if they even care or know anything about the hardship you went to to bring that peace. You want to read it again, to have these adventures and meet these friends, and you can, because the books are so long that you can’t possibly remember every little thing at first. And the films compliment the books wonderfully. They capture the spirit of the story written by J.R.R. Tolkien. You can sit down and watch all three in roughly 12 hours depending on food breaks and what not. Or you can spend a few weeks on the books, and travel with the characters, and you end up investing yourself in at least one of the characters. The one that you see yourself in the most. For me, reading it for the first time years ago, that was Sam. I realized this when I got to “The Choices of Master Samwise” and he had to make the decision to take the Ring and go the rest of the way alone.

Harry Potter hasn’t had any of that as of yet, and I don’t think it’ll end up being more than Voldemort making one last try at returning, and being stopped for the last time, no more than a typical evil wizard story told time and time again. Granted, it should be bigger than this, but that we won’t know for probably 3 years.